


unspeakable road

by Laburnum



Category: Dragonlance - Margaret Weis & Tracy Hickman
Genre: M/M, Mid-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-31
Updated: 2017-07-31
Packaged: 2018-12-09 12:59:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,636
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11669610
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Laburnum/pseuds/Laburnum
Summary: The road to Thorbadin is long and hard-worn.





	unspeakable road

**Author's Note:**

  * For [tonepoem](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tonepoem/gifts).



> _But not for you;_   
>  _You cannot follow me into the night,_   
>  _Into the maze of sweetness. For you stand_   
>  _Cradled by the sun, in solid lands,_   
>  _Expecting nothing, having lost your way_   
>  _Before the road becomes unspeakable._
> 
>  
> 
> (Raistlin's Farewell)

 

The road to Thorbadin is long and hard-worn, but still the army grows in number as men from taverns, farmhouses, smithshops pledge themselves to him. Caramon can hardly believe it. It is almost like a dream.

Raistlin, cloaked in black robes and someone else’s name, laughs softly at his wonder. “Do you really think yourself capable of conjuring up the images of these many men and horses and armaments and tents, brother?”

“Nope,” Caramon replies, and as always, it reassures him.

 

* * *

 

 

This is the way it should be. This is the way it should always have been.

Caramon knows the men comment about it— they wonder what, exactly is his relationship to the black mage— but he also makes no secret of it when asked, just as he makes no secret of their closeness.

“But, General,” they say, with the rigid posture of fear, “isn’t it bad luck to have a mage in the army?”

Caramon just guffaws. “Bad luck – bad luck, you say! Have we had anything but good fortune on this campaign? Good weather, strong wine, loyal companions-in-arms? The mage is the _best_ luck we have ever come across. Everything this army is, we owe to him. So pay him the respect he deserves, will you?”

Later, when he retires to his tent for the evening, Raistlin says, “Back from another day of cavorting?”

“Another day of defending your honor against the ignorant and presumptuous, brother,” Caramon says.

 

Raistlin’s smile is warm, and in the past such a thing would make Caramon feel very, very cold, because Raistlin sees many, many layers deeper than Caramon ever can and Raistlin never yields advantage. But this is a different time, a different and far happier place, and Caramon can make himself believe that Raistlin is different, too.

(To the side, Crysania lifts her eyes from her meditation to regard them both. Pretty girl, Caramon thinks, and cannot suppress a smile when he sees Raistlin’s eyes linger. He wonders where Raistlin found her first—or, maybe it was she who found him.)

Raistlin rises and announces he will return to his own tent to study his spells. Caramon remains for a while to clear the table, and seeing that Raistlin has left his tea, picks it up and follows him from the tent.

“A game of chess, brother?” Raistlin says, when Caramon has set down the mug of tea on the small sturdy table by the Raistlin's pallet. Caramon nods, fetches the case – the one non-essential item Raistlin allows himself – and sets the game up on the floor next to the table.

After Raistlin had introduced the game Caramon had picked it up quickly, seeing in the movement of pawn and bishop and knight the strength and directional force of his own growing army. He plays white, of course, for knight’s honor, for Lady Crysania’s favour and for the sign of Paladine. Raistlin plays black, for his magic and for the role of defender he plays to Caramon's invader. Without fail, he wins. Caramon can never best his brother in a game of wits. Yet he learns, still, when Raistlin explains traps and forks and pins. Teaches Caramon how to avoid them all, and then wins a completely different way.

 

“You’ll teach me about your tactics so I can learn to counter them?”

“As if,” Raistlin breathes, just loud enough for Caramon to hear. Out loud he says, “You’re improving. Maybe we’ll even win this war.”

Caramon preens at the faint praise. “Always so pessimistic, Raist.”

“Pragmatic,” Raistlin replies without missing a beat. He smiles, and reaches across the board to topple Caramon’s king; Caramon watches the white piece fall, laughing as he does so, and as he reaches to catch the piece before it rolls from the table, he catches Raistlin’s hand instead.

(Not entirely on accident.)

"Good game, brother mine."

Raistlin is still light enough for Caramon to pick up in one hand, but beneath the velvet black robes his limbs are strong instead of twig-like, his pallor healthy instead of metal-gold in daylight, and he smiles as Caramon runs a thumb over the inside of his wrist.

The first time Caramon saw Raistlin smile in this place, it had surprised him. For so long, he hadn’t thought Raistlin capable. But there are many more things in this place and time that will bring a smile to Raistlin's face: power over men, or being able to stand on his own without collapsing in the wind. Crysania.

 

They can make up lost time now, at any rate. The whole world laid out before them both for the taking. This is the way it should always have been. This is the way it should always be.

Raistlin is not pretty by any measure, and none of the men outside would glance at him twice if they met him in a tavern — but Caramon thinks he’s beautiful, with the sort of fondness that grows from familiarity.

(Oh, he knows Raistlin would burn him to ash without a reason— _has_ burned his image to ash for no reason at all – but for now, they need each other.)

Night is rapidly falling and Caramon fetches the lamp from Raistlin’s desk, lays it on the ground between them net to the chess set, and hears Raistlin set the wick alight with his magic words. It’s different from what he says to light the Staff of Magius. Raistlin had explained inflections and word stems to Caramon before, and then said he won’t do it again since Caramon was uninterested enough to fall asleep the first time.

There was no bitterness in it.

(When they were children they discovered a nest of wriggling baby rabbits, the mother dead by the roadside. Raistlin said then they’d die of cold and hunger in three days, so Caramon put them in a box and brought them home, out of the wind, and morning and evening he fed them milk from the nursing barn cats. They died anyway. Raistlin is never wrong. But, Caramon reasons, it was worth a shot.

Raistlin smiled then. _As you are, brother,_ he had said, and there had been no bitterness in that, either.)

 

“What’s so funny, Raist?”

“Nothing, nothing at all…”

Caramon almost stands, muscle memory of fetching water to make tea, but Raistlin’s hand catches his wrist as he turns to leave. “I’m fine, brother.”

“All right.” Caramon lifts his hands to the ring of light. “Look, Raist,” he says, a laugh in his voice. “Bunnies.”

“Mm,” Raistlin hums in reply. “You know, rabbits don’t like being lonely.”

Raistlin shapes his own hands so that another shadow rabbit hops into view on the wall, and Caramon watches it jump and dance in the light with a dexterity and deftness Caramon himself could never have. There is no envy in it, only observation. Instead he chases that rabbit with his own hands, round and round on the side of the tent by the wavering candlelight.

“When you look at me, Caramon,” Raistlin says softly, “what do you see?”

“I see you, Raist. What else is there?”

Caramon has never really understood what Raistlin is afraid of, does not know what kind of otherworld specters haunt his sleep. But this he knows: this is Raist, the baby brother he ferried to magic school in a hay cart that jerked as it ran over the potholes in the streets of Solace.

“They call me Fistandantilus.” Movement in the dark as Raistlin reaches for the blood-red ruby that hangs from his neck; a relic from the old lich whose body, Raistlin said once, this used to be.

“It’s just a name,” Caramon says.

Raistlin nods. “And everything that happened?” he whispers.

“It was just  a bad dream, Raist.”

Raistlin laughs softly and his eyes slip closed; he leans into Caramon, small and warm, and Caramon willingly takes the weight; Raistlin reaches up to touch his face, fingers cool and dry, and leans up to kiss him. There is the scent of roses and the taste of Raistlin's tea, the cup half-empty and gone cold on the table.

There is blood between them—blood that mingled in the womb, blood shed over ritual and battle, blood Caramon dabbed away from Raistlin’s lips on terribly damp nights when their ragtag party huddled round a dying fire, Raistlin clutching tepid tea and the Staff of Magius to his chest. Before, it sat between them sick and stagnant, curdling like milk in summer heat. But now Raistlin tastes like ash and wine, sweet and heady and maybe, maybe, this time it will not end in cold lightning and a funeral pyre.

(And if there is the persistent sense that all this is just a dream, then Caramon would really rather they never wake up.)

Raistlin pulls away first, looks into Caramon's eyes and smiles at him. "Good night, brother," he says, and curls up on the pallet, still turned towards him. Caramon runs his fingers over Raistlin’s closed eyelids, the curve of his cheek; it is not a familiar face but still his beloved brother’s face, Raist’s face, and Caramon smiles as its expression smoothens in sleep.

After he is sure Raistlin is asleep he blows out the candle lightly, leaves for his own tent. Outside by the dying embers of an evening’s fire, Crysania, clutching her medallion of Paladine absently to her chest as she turns her face to the sky where Solinari is high. Her eyes are blank, and Caramon knows she is thinking of something else.

She’s thinking of Raistlin, perhaps, or that prophecy that said only destruction awaits them in the cellars of Thorbadin. He leaves her to her meditations. Pulls aside the cloth flap to his own dark tent; curls up on his own pallet, and closes his eyes, and does not dream.

 

 


End file.
